Amazingly, 80 percent of all business data contains a location component, yet most organizations are not using it or don’t know how. On Nov. 15, Boundless expanded its open GIS solution into an ecosystem of geo-aware open source data, content and expertise that makes the latest GIS data easily available to developers and analysts in both public and private sectors.

On Media Day at the Bentley Year In Infrastructure 2016 Conference held in London, the media was treated to Industry presentations for the various industry segments that Bentley Systems serves. The event is a vehicle for Bentley’s jurored Be Inspired Awards, which are bestowed on the selected finalists at a Wednesday evening gala event. Prior to the event, technology sessions highlight the work of the finalists and the company provides industry forums to showcase new technologies on the horizon.

Hexagon Safety & Infrastructure acquired GISquadrat GmbH of Vienna, Austria. The acquisition is aimed at enhancing Hexagon’s geospatial, cloud and mobile solutions for governments and utility providers in Europe as well as bringing in more than 300 customers and thousands of users into the Hexagon fold.

What was the most exciting attraction in the Exhibit Hall at the Esri User Conference 2016? Hard to say, as the 14,000+ attendees flocked to see the plethora of exciting exhibits from third party companies, and of course the numerous demonstrations of Esri products and services. Drones, imagery, field solutions, utilities, navigation, spatially enabled business apps, data management, all vied for an audience at the conference. Esri’s Drone2Map was a huge hit, and Collector for ArcGIS was a product that garnered an enormous amount of attention at its demonstrations and technical workshops, offering the promise of providing mapping to professionals in the field workforce that would in turn, improve the accuracy and currency of spatial data.

At an industry session held at SPAR3D 2016 in April in The Woodlands, Texas, Steve Hutsell, Chief, Geospatial Section U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), Seattle District, and Lou Bush, Director of Survey, Bowman Consulting Group, gave a talk entitled: “Integrated Data Capture, BIM, CIM, GIS and CAD – Owner and Industry Perspectives on Products, Processes and Policies for Informed Decision Making.”